The ways in which digital media are shared today are somewhat limited. Today, there are two primary ways that people exchange digital media. A first way is a fairly interactive way using a personal computer (PC) having an upstream and downstream connection to, for example, the Internet.
An Internet service provider (ISP) may provide temporary Internet protocol (IP) addresses to PC's connected to the Internet using, for example, dynamic host configuration protocol (DHCP). The PC's may then access web pages on the Internet using a web browser and send and receive email with or without file attachments to exchange media, data, and services between PC's. Files may also be transferred over the Internet using a file transfer protocol (FTP), FTP allows PC's connected to the Internet to exchange files, independently of the PC platform.
A user of a PC may connect a device, for example, a digital camera or an MP3 player to his PC and download digital files from the device to the PC. Such a device may interface to a PC through a Universal Serial Bus (USB) interface to exchange digital media between a PC and the device. Again, the digital files may be attached to emails and shared with others in such a manner.
A user may have access to digital broadcast media through a set-top box providing predominantly one-way communication (i.e., broadcast media is sent from a broadcast media provider to the set-top box). A user of a set-top box may also be able to order pay per view (PPV) broadcast channels via the set-top box, but interaction between the user and the set-top box is, otherwise, very limited. A set-top box may interface to a cable infrastructure, a satellite infrastructure or a digital subscriber line (DSL) infrastructure to receive broadcast media and to exchange access information between the infrastructure and the set-top box.
Further limitations and disadvantages of conventional and traditional approaches will become apparent to one of skill in the art, through comparison of such systems with aspects of the present invention as set forth in the remainder of the present application with reference to the drawings.